From Debugging to Authoring: Adapting Productivity Tools to Narrative Content Description

Recent progress in Interactive Storytelling has been mostly based on the development of proof-of-concept prototypes, whilst the actual production process for interactive narratives largely remains to be invented. Central to this effort is the concept of authoring, which should determine the relationships between generative technologies underlying Interactive Storytelling engines, and the actual description of narrative content. In this paper, we report the development of an authoring technology on top of a fully-implemented Interactive Storytelling system. Although this system originated as a debugging tool for a Planning system, its interactivity as well as the high-level nature of the formalism it manipulates makes it a candidate to support collaboration between authors and technologists.